A quiet fear in a 'village of traitors' / Arabs who were informants for Israel to lose Gaza homes -- as will town's original residents

Matthew B. Stannard, Chronicle Staff Writer

Published
4:00 am PDT, Sunday, July 17, 2005

Village of traitors

Village of traitors

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Village of traitors

Village of traitors

A quiet fear in a 'village of traitors' / Arabs who were informants for Israel to lose Gaza homes -- as will town's original residents

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2005-07-17 04:00:00 PDT Dahaniya, Gaza Strip -- You can see the outside world from the roof of what passes for city hall in Dahaniya -- an Egyptian flag fluttering from a border outpost, the disused airstrip at Gaza International Airport, Israeli tanks posted at a checkpoint. Officially it is part of the Gaza Strip, but it appears on no maps.

It is also known as the "village of traitors."

And with Israel's planned withdrawal from the Gaza Strip just weeks away, the 350 people who live there are wondering what is to become of them.

"They are not certain, but they are certain of one thing," said resident Ishmael Shtewe. "The houses here will be demolished."

His uncle, Auda Shtewe, the village moqtar, a traditional community leader, said the first of the so-called traitors arrived in 1987 -- 12 families from the Sinai who had helped Israel by informing on their fellow Arabs and then hid in Jewish settlements in the Sinai. When those settlements were evacuated as part of Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, they were relocated by Israel to Dahaniya, where they were joined over the next few years by another 15 or so families from Gaza who were informers for Israel during the first Palestinian intifada, from 1987 to 1991.

The original villagers, mostly Bedouin, who after the 1967 Six-Day War had given up the nomadic life for concrete apartments and tents for their animals, did not exactly welcome the newcomers, the moqtar said. But the Bedouins, who have a tradition of hospitality, tolerated them. And the new residents could always use their alarms to summon Israeli army protection if they felt threatened, he said.

But the villagers became increasingly isolated.

Outsiders, who viewed the newcomers with hostility and suspicion, turned down invitations to visit. Soon, all who lived in the village, whether they had been collaborators or not, were dubbed as traitors.

"We asked the Israelis" why the village was selected, the moqtar said. "They said, 'It's our land. We'll do with it what we like. If you don't like it, leave.' "

Over the years, the informers began to leave, to parts unknown in Israel, until just a few remained. Now, once Israel leaves and the residents' houses are torn down as part of the Gaza evacuation plan, the entire village faces the prospect of being absorbed by a Palestinian population that includes many who have come to hate them.

The villagers say they don't know what to expect. Could they be relocated to Israel to start new lives as Arabs in a Jewish land? Will such an offer, assuming it is extended, only apply to those few remaining families who actually helped the Jewish state?

"The Israeli authorities ignored them. They don't know how to treat them, " said Tel Aviv attorney Yoram Melmen, who earlier this month filed a petition on behalf of 40 of the families with Israel's Supreme Court and is now negotiating a possible settlement with the Israeli government.

"Since the Palestinian people treat them as traitors, you can't abandon them. If you are going to leave them there, they're going to slaughter them. You can't ignore them. It's a matter of life," Melmen said.

Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Coordinator of Israeli Government Activities in the Territories, acknowledged that the Israeli government housed hundreds of collaborators in Dahaniya -- reaching the high point between 1993 and 1996 -- and in a similar village near Jenin in the West Bank. But those families are long gone.

"They are already in Israel. They are part of Israeli society. Some people don't know they were collaborators. Some people don't know they were Arabs," said Dror, who said the Israeli government provided the families with money, new identities, and even psychological help. "All of them get along in Israel very nicely."

Dror said three families of collaborators remain in Dahaniya while Israel puts together their compensation package. They -- along with 17 families whose members married Israeli citizens and three other families the Israeli government has determined face threats to their lives for reasons unrelated to collaboration -- will all be safely in Israel before the scheduled Aug. 15 pullout, he said.

Most of the remaining families, Dror said, consist of members whose problems, if any, are not related to their association with Dahaniya -- they are drug smugglers, car thieves and pimps, he insisted.

And they are using their village's reputation and their own alleged fears of reprisals to seek a better deal from the Israeli government -- although he suggested the villagers would be better served taking the current package and buying land in Gaza before the Palestinian Authority destroys Dahaniya to make room for expansion of the Gaza airport. But, he added, all claims of feared reprisals would be investigated, and the government is hoping to increase the compensation packages for Dahaniya's residents.

"The first thing we'll do is check if this guy goes to Gaza every day." Such apparent freedom of movement, Dror said, would indicate "he's not in any danger."

Melmen said his clients deny having criminal backgrounds, and says their fear is very real.

The Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group has documented dozens of cases of suspected Palestinian collaborators being killed in the street or sentenced to death by the Palestinian Authority during the second intifada, which began in 2000.

Aware of the controversial nature of the village, and the need to protect the identities of the families, Israeli authorities would not allow any photographs to be taken there.

Despite the concerns, the villagers are not scared, the moqtar insisted. At first, a crowd of young men outside city hall, in their teens and early 20s wearing a mixture of Western and Bedouin clothing, agreed.

Then a man in a white dishdasha (robe) walked up and spoke in disgust.

"Why don't you tell him the truth?" he demanded. "We are afraid."

The other men watched him stalk off, then explained quietly that the man had been arrested in Gaza by Palestinian police, beaten, and sent running through an orchard with a bag over his head while police shot at his feet -- all because he came from Dahaniya. The man refused to discuss the story, but some of the other men began to discuss their own experiences.

"Even inside Israel, somebody gave me a ride, and he asked me where I was from. I told him, and he said, 'Oh -- the village of traitors,' " said one of them who with great reluctance gave only his first name, Zaki.

"If somebody from Israel calls me a traitor, what are they going to do to me in Gaza?" he asked.

Apart from the fears, there were also financial considerations about the handover. In Israel, where Zaki works at a grocery store, he makes 200 shekels a day. In Gaza, "if you're lucky and God loves you, you might make 20 shekels a day." And after years of close contact and receiving water and services from Israel, the villagers lack the antipathy toward Israel shared by many of their Palestinian neighbors.

"Gaza is only 4 kilometers away, and I don't know one square meter of it, " Zaki said, pointing toward the airport. "Israel, I know every inch."

The villagers refused to show the way to homes where they said the remaining informers lived -- they didn't even want to be seen near those homes. But they allowed some of the children to show the way.

The homes looked like all the others -- except their doors were shut tight. After several knocks at one door, a voice inside responded, then a door opened slightly, revealing a young woman wearing a high white turban.

"I don't know why, exactly, but my father moved here," she said, after receiving reassurances that her name would not appear in a newspaper. Told that other villagers claimed her father was a collaborator with Israel, she shrugged: "People can say what they want. I can't talk about it ... we mind our own business. We have a nice neighborhood here, and they treat us well."

After she closed the door, one of the neighbor children sneered.

"She didn't tell the truth," the boy, Hamid, said. "Her father is a spy. They used to work for the Israelis in Gaza and they brought him here."

Hamid led the way to a row of vacant concrete homes. These were the houses of the collaborators who had moved to Israel over the years, he explained.

Outside lay the remains of a rotting sheep. Graffiti covered the outer walls. The inside walls were reduced to rubble, the adjoining corners used as toilets.

Other children who had joined the tour said they were responsible for the destruction, explaining with grins and gestures how they had rendered the homes inhabitable.

"We didn't want them to bring any more spies here," Hamid said firmly. "We need to cleanse the village of spies as quickly as possible."